Businesses often juggle the need of retaining data while keeping their computer systems efficient. Data must be kept for a period of time to comply with regulatory requirements. And as an optimal business practice, businesses need to retain backup data so that they are readily available for disaster recovery. However, keeping every bit of data is impractical and may clutter computer systems. Further, some data including backup data may be accessed very rarely. In extreme cases, the access rate may be once in a few years. Thus, businesses may desire to remove these rarely accessed files so that valuable storage space may be freed up to store more recent data and unnecessary clutter may be reduced.
Archiving is often used in conjunction with backup techniques to free up valuable storage space while maintaining valuable data for regulatory compliance and/or disaster recovery. During archiving, files may be migrated from a primary storage to a secondary storage and replaced with stubs containing file attributes. The stubs are relatively small in size and may be used to redirect an access request to a new file location in the secondary storage. When a user needs to access the files at a later time, applications may seamlessly recall the files from the secondary storage. Thus, in view of the user, the files still appear to reside on the primary storage, even though stubs may have taken place of the actual files. By storing smaller sized stubs on high cost storage during archiving, and backing up stubs generated during archiving, businesses may realize cost saving and improve the efficiency of computer systems.
Even though archiving frees up valuable storage space, a large number of stubs corresponding to a large number of rarely accessed files may present the same clutter to businesses. Thus, users may want to clean up these rarely accessed stubs, but be able to access them when needed, such as when complying with regulatory requirements and/or in case of disaster recovery.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method or system that leverages on backup and archiving techniques to provide extended deletion and restoration function.